When New and Improved Isn’t
Better can be the enemy of the good.
In the US we have no trouble finding cookware. As basic tools go, vessels in which to prepare food are available everywhere. There’s a deli in my own Brooklyn neighborhood that always has a couple of cheap stamped, non-stick aluminum pans hanging with the canned goods. There’s a layer of dust that suggests slow sales, but still, they have the tool if you want your take-out panini toasted once you get it home and your last disposable pan just gave out.
Cookware may be a commonplace, but it doesn’t need replacing every day. How do makers of such things keep people interested in buying their goods? The obvious answer is to position the same old thing as some new thing. In the case of pots and pans, they can be formed of new materials, decorated elaborately, sprayed with the latest “non-stick” coating, given a “Stā-kool” handle, or have “Eco-” inserted somewhere in the name. Often something can be made to seem “better” by simply disparaging how it used to be.
If something that performs a basic function is continually reintroduced as “better”, was it ever any good to begin with? With respect to cookware, one could easily be led to believe that in the last couple of generations we’ve been making up for lost time, given the number of times simple pots have been “revolutionized”.
Often something can be made to seem “better” by simply disparaging how it used to be.
Prodding by entities that rely on our consumption of ever more of their products is not the same as having a cultural rudder to steer us in the direction of good anything, much less good food. Cultural rudderlessness has itself spawned an industry that reinvents our diets every few years — not on the basis of what our senses tell us about what would be authentically nourishing, sustaining and tasty to eat, but on the basis of assurances from experts, government guidelines, and, finally, advertising. All promise to relieve doubt and increase security, but all drive a wedge deeper into our relationship with our food.
Thus, with plenty of help we didn’t need or ask for, in just the past couple of generations we’ve taken to cooking on plastic to avoid cleaning up, to complicated processing to avoid “wasting” time on cooking, to drive-up dining to avoid downtime, to carbohydrates to avoid fats, to hydrogenated fats to avoid butter, to vegetables to avoid meat, to meat to avoid carbohydrates, and in every case we succumbed to expertism on the premise that our own palates, after hundreds of thousands of years, are suddenly inauthentic arbiters of our sustenance.
A culture committed to “better” will always want for anything good in the here-and-now.
If what we thought was the good is superseded daily by the better, this leads to a collapse of faith in anything being good enough, not least of which our own senses. But “better” is necessarily forward-looking, so a culture committed to better will always want for anything good in the here-and-now. This, I believe, is why “authentic” things and experiences are of such interest these days, for they represent, literally, timeless goods.
It’s often said that economies grow through innovation, and absolutists on this point insist that nothing is so good that it can’t be better. I’m a little ambivalent about this because I favor progress (not least my own), but I think a view of progress that neglects the mature behaviors, beliefs and technologies that for millennia have served the human spirit and built human connections is an arid and dissipated way forward. Each of us is at least partly a creation of both the people and the cultures that parented us; they are, in a sense, the vessels in which we’ve been prepared.
Cooking is a technology that reads out of the history of human evolution and translates what is not us into us. Cookware does not need innovation. We are the innovation, made anew with every meal. And if we cook well, we’re made better in countless ways.
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